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alpha particle

positively charged particle, identical to the nucleus of the
helium-4 atom, spontaneously emitted by some radioactive substances, consisting of two protons and two neutrons bound together, thus having a mass of four units and a positive charge of two. Discovered and named (1899) by Ernest Rutherford, alpha particles were used by him and coworkers in experiments to probe the structure of atoms...

boson

...quantum-mechanical units of 0, 1, etc.) that is governed by the Bose-Einstein statistics (
q.v.). Bosons include mesons (
e.g., pions and kaons), nuclei of even mass number (
e.g.,helium-4), and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory (
e.g., photons and gluons). Bosons differ significantly from a group of subatomic particles known as fermions...

superfluidity

...of helium contain from one to six neutrons, so their mass numbers range from three to eight. Of these six isotopes, only those with mass numbers of three (helium-3, or
3He) and four (
helium-4, or
4He) are stable; all the others are radioactive, decaying very rapidly into other substances. The helium that is present on Earth is not a primordial component but has been...

The stable isotopes of helium are helium-3 (or
3He), with two protons and one neutron, and
helium-4 (or
4He), with two protons and two neutrons.
4He forms the bulk of naturally occurring helium, but the lighter isotope
3He has been formed, since about 1950, in experimentally useful quantities by the decay of tritium produced in nuclear reactors.